Malpractice in Maggody

by Joan Hess

  He answered with his customary charm. “You’ve got fifteen seconds, starting now.”

  I identified myself, then asked him if he’d learned anything more from the autopsies of Molly Foss and Randall Zumi.

  “I didn’t bother to do an autopsy on Zumi. The blood tests proved he took a handful of pills, and I don’t have time to waste on suicides. His body was sent to the lab in Little Rock earlier this afternoon. As for the girl, there was one thing I missed at the crime scene. She was smacked on the back of her head before she died. It left a bruise, but it wasn’t hard enough to cause any bleeding or kill her. She would have been feeling real woozy, though. Easier to hold facedown in the water. There was a trace of alcohol in her blood, no more than .02 or thereabouts. She’d had maybe one drink.”

  “Any idea what caused the bruise?”

  “Your standard run-of-the-mill blunt object. Considering she was in a garden, I’d rule out a baseball bat or a hockey stick. Whatever it was, you ain’t gonna find traces of blood on it. Hear tell you sent another one this way. Should I be expecting him?”

  “I hope not.” I thanked him and hung up before he could make any macabre jokes. He’d spent forty years in the morgue. I shuddered to think about what his home life might be like.

  I pushed the button to close the gate, then went back to sit by the pool. Until a deputy arrived, Toby, Dawn, and I needed to stay together—at a civilized distance.

  18

  Ruby Bee delivered a pitcher of beer and a complimentary basket of cheese fries to a couple in one of the booths who had confided that they were celebrating their ninth wedding anniversary. She didn’t reckon they’d make it to the tenth, but there wasn’t any cause to say so.

  She refilled a few mugs for the drinkers sitting at the bar, looked at the crowd to make sure everybody was doing okay, then went to talk to Estelle. “Guess what happened the middle of this afternoon?”

  Estelle wound a stray curl around her little finger. “Roy Stiver proposed, and you and him are eloping as soon as you close for the night.”

  “I am serious, Estelle.”

  “Then give me a minute to think. Okay, Dahlia’s granny came in with a shotgun and held you up. Am I gettin’ closer?”

  “About as close as Milwaukee. I went out back to take the Mexicans some biscuits left over from lunch, and every last one of them was gone. Their rooms are emptier than a dead man’s eyes. They was considerate enough to strip the beds and pile the sheets by the door with the towels, which I thought was a real sweet thing to do. But they’re gone, kit and caboodle, and most likely for good. They even took their grill.”

  Estelle frowned. “I have to admit that’s strange. Does Arly know?”

  “I suppose so,” said Ruby Bee. “She’s been out at the Stonebridge Foundation most of the day. Do you think they got fired?”

  Before Estelle could answer, a group of fellows in matching plaid shirts and bolo ties came in and sat down at a table. Ruby Bee hustled over to get their orders. By the time she’d carried over a couple of pitchers, half a dozen mugs, and several bags of corn chips and pork rinds, she’d almost forgotten about the Mexicans.

  “Do you know who they are?” she said excitedly to Estelle. “They’re the Amarillo Armadillos. They sing at rodeos and tent revivals all across Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Ain’t that something?”

  “If you’re such a big fan, why doncha get their autographs?”

  Ruby Bee’s grin faded. “I ain’t exactly heard of them, if you must know, but they said they were real famous. They met Willie Nelson once at a truck stop.”

  “If I felt any fainter, I’d topple off the stool and land on my head,” Estelle said. “So what else about the Mexicans?”

  “Nothing else,” admitted Ruby Bee, peeved that Estelle didn’t share her enthusiasm for the Amarillo Armadillos. They were kinda old, but they’d been real polite. In this day and age, that counted for something.

  “You get paid in advance for their rooms?”

  “I got one month, and since they weren’t here much more than a week, I reckon I made out okay. You think maybe something happened out at that place to make them bolt like they did? Should I call Arly?”

  Estelle sucked on a pretzel while she thought about it. “No, she’d just get all high and mighty about being bothered while she’s in the middle of her ‘official investigation.’ She must know about the Mexicans leaving, and you don’t have anything else to say.”

  “I suppose not,” said Ruby Bee, then went back over to the Amarillo Armadillos to see if they wanted something to eat.

  I sat down near Dawn and watched Toby. “Maybe it’ll burn off some testosterone,” I said.

  “Maybe it’ll rain pennies from heaven.” She held up her hand, her fingers splayed, and said, “Like it?”

  “Love it,” I lied. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen the same puke pumpkin shade on Estelle’s fingernails a week ago, and I was pretty sure the bottle of polish had cost less than a dollar. “I don’t know what to do about dinner. You want to look around the kitchen with me?”

  “Might as well. I was thinking we should sort of hang out together tonight. If I go back to my suite, I won’t be able to sleep. Every time the damn dog barks, I’ll break out in a sweat. Molly, Dr. Zumi, and now Dr. Dibbins. It’s so damn creepy.”

  “No argument from me,” I said. We went to the kitchen and I unlocked the door. The cook (I couldn’t bear to call him a chef) and his helpers had had the decency to clean up before they galloped into the sunset. The cold storage room, however, had a padlock, and none of Stonebridge’s keys would work.

  Dawn grimaced. “What are we supposed to do now?”

  I continued on to the pantry where the employees ate. Brenda, radical advocate of organic and unprocessed food, had made sure that no cans of beans or boxes of cereal would sully the premises with their poisonous chemicals and obscure polysyllabic additives. I spotted a bag of rice cakes. “Unless you want to pick field greens, we may have to make do with this.”

  “Lucky us,” she said glumly, then brightened. “You know, I bet the doctors stashed some food in their apartments. You’ve got the keys, and we haven’t got anything better to do. Let’s see what we can find. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  It was as good an idea as any. We started in Brenda’s apartment and found more rice cakes and a jar of what was billed as one hundred percent organic peanut butter. It looked vile, but I was getting hungry, so we took it. Dawn stopped in the office and giggled. “Look, she has her pencils arranged by size. Talk about anal-retentive. They ought to write her up in a textbook.”

  “I don’t think she’d appreciate the publicity,” I said.

  “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  We did better in Walter’s apartment. He had a bag of chips in a cabinet, along with a six-pack of beer and two avocados in the refrigerator. I was worried that the medications Dawn and Toby were taking might interact badly with the alcohol, but Dawn wasn’t concerned.

  “If we had salsa, we could make guacamole,” she said as she gathered up the goodies. “Well, you could, anyway. I don’t know how to make toast.”

  We went through Randall’s office to his apartment, although I already knew the pickings were slim. Dawn turned up her nose at the grapes, but took the yogurt.

  When we got to Stonebridge’s door, I stopped. “I’m not sure we should go in. He might wake up.”

  “So what?” she said. “I mean, it’s his place, and he’s responsible for our health. Don’t be such a wimp. You yourself said he was passed out. We could ride in on mules or cows or whatever they ride around here and not wake him up. He’s probably got all kinds of food and booze.”

  I unlocked the door and we crept across the office like little elves. He was still on his bed, snoring. Dawn opened the refrigerator. “I told you so,” she whispered as she grabbed a bottle of champagne. “Look in the cabinet.”

  The cabinet was well stocked with jars of caviar and pâ
té. Dawn greedily loaded up everything she could carry, then looked at me. “Get some more,” she added urgently, as if we were headed into the hills to hide in a cave. “We need the crackers and a knife. Isn’t this fun? Where do you think he keeps his booze?”

  Stonebridge snuffled. We both froze until he flopped over and resumed snoring. I released my breath and did a quick search. The cabinet under the sink had enough bottles to stock a liquor store. Dawn could barely restrain herself from chortling as she took out a bottle of scotch.

  We slipped outside and deposited our trove on the table by the pool. Dawn opened the scotch and took an unladylike swig. “Not bad at all,” she said as she wiped her chin. “How about a cracker with a nice dollop of caviar? Too bad we don’t have any capers or sour cream.”

  Toby must have smelled the food. He climbed out of the pool, shook himself, and joined us. “Jesus, where did all this come from?”

  Dawn grinned. “Figure it out for yourself, Einstein—or should that be Frankeinstein? Get it? Frank-einstein?”

  I leaned back and watched them scarfing down food and drink. I found myself staring at the champagne bottle. Bottles, bottles everywhere, but not a drop to drink. I waved off Dawn’s attempt to share the scotch. Two little bottles, both of which had been tainted with potentially lethal drugs.

  “I’m going for a walk in the garden,” I said as I stood up. “Yell if you need me.”

  “Are you sick or something?” asked Dawn.

  “No, I’m just thinking about the bottles. Not these from Stonebridge’s private stock, but the ones Dibbins attempted to smuggle inside. His fingerprints should have been on them.”

  Toby brayed. “That fat old goat? I’m not surprised. Did Dr. Skiller catch him red-handed? She’s a damn bloodhound. I thought I’d get past her with a few pills, but she pawed through every inch of the stuff in my bag. And when she found them, I thought she’d box my ears like a Sunday school teacher.”

  “She got my coke,” Dawn said sadly. “Over five hundred dollars’ worth. I about cried, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.”

  I sighed, wondering if they were as clueless as they seemed. “I’ll leave you two to commiserate.”

  “We’ll save some champagne for you,” said Dawn, “but not forever.” She picked up the bottle and read the label. “This is very pricey stuff.”

  Toby took it out of her hands. “Hell, when I was out at the clubs in L.A., we’d drink a case of it and eat caviar by the spoonful. There was this one chick who got sick all over the limo. It was a real hoot!”

  I headed for the garden before I heard further details. I followed a path that I thought would take me to Dibbins’s secluded bench. I could still hear Toby’s and Dawn’s voices as they vied to prove which one of them had behaved more badly in public, but at least I couldn’t see them.

  Brenda had confiscated Dibbins’s cache, taken out the six bottles of gin for Randall, and then left the box outside the back door of the kitchen. The employees had found it, but not before someone else had removed at least one bottle of wine, and perhaps a bottle of gin. Whoever it was had not swilled the contents at the first opportunity, but instead had hidden them from Brenda’s relentless scrutiny. This suggested some sort of premeditation. I bent down and peered under the bench. Dibbins had taped his precious cigars to the bottom, as I’d suspected. The garden offered innumerable hiding places.

  A rather good theory was struggling to evolve, but Molly’s murder kept throwing me off. It couldn’t have been premeditated. Instead of knocking on Toby’s door, she could have gone home after the staff meeting. Her decision to stay had been serendipitous. Toby might have anticipated it, but none of the others could have. Surely no one could have counted on her to rush out of the building as she’d done. It wouldn’t have occurred to Toby that she might not be susceptible to his charm and delighted to indulge in sex with “The Man.” Humility was not among his virtues—if he had any.

  Dawn came along the path and sat down beside me. She was carrying the bottle of scotch, and her words were less than carefully enunciated as she said, “Sure you don’t want to try this? It’s very yummy.”

  “What’s Toby doing?”

  “He decided to go lift weights. I hope he doesn’t drop a barbell on his head, not that it could cause noticeable brain damage. He’s beyond that.” She took a drink, then put the bottle on the ground. “What are you doing back here?”

  “Thinking.”

  “Good. I was afraid you were worrying about Dr. Dibbins. He’s a menace to society with his diet plan. One of my best friends gained three pounds the first month she was on his diet. He spouts all this gibberish about how the gain is only temporary, but it’s shit. Everybody knows you can’t stuff yourself with bread and pasta. I mean, let’s get real.”

  “Let’s do that, Dawn,” I said. “When I read your file, one thing went through my mind almost immediately: six degrees of separation. Funny, huh?”

  “Hysterical,” she said as she picked up the bottle and took another drink. “Don’t quit your day job to become a standup comic.”

  I couldn’t read her expression in the shadows, but I doubted she was smiling. “Well, you and Sunny were from Arkansas—and now you’re back. Is Sunny buried in Stubbett?”

  “My mother got all weepy and wanted her to spend eternity in the family plot out back of the Baptist church. The truth is that it was free. My mother’s been scrimping ever since the show was canceled. She’s done well enough to keep herself in gigolos, but she goes out every afternoon to look in the mailbox for residual checks. After I got my second DUI, she sold my MG and bought me a used Toyota. Can you imagine the humiliation? I dyed my hair black and ran away to Vegas, but the cops caught me.”

  “Tough life,” I commented. “Let’s talk some more about Sunny. After she was diagnosed, where was she sent?”

  “Some hospital out of state. My mother was too embarrassed to tell anyone, so her story was that Sunny was studying in Paris. Like anybody believed it.”

  “Was the hospital here in Arkansas, in Little Rock? Don’t bother to deny it, Dawn. I can make a phone call and find out in five minutes.”

  “Okay, so my mother packed her off to this gawdawful hospital with bars on the windows and padded rooms and straitjackets. My mother claimed it was the best place for her. It was for my mother, if not Sunny. Out of sight, and no need to visit because of the distance and bother. I went a couple of times, but I couldn’t stand it. You can’t begin to imagine how bad those places are. All these old men and women cruising up and down the halls with vacant eyes. A teenage boy playing checkers, except there weren’t any checkers and he wasn’t playing against anybody. Men masturbating in their rocking chairs. I would have done anything to get Sunny out of there, but by my second visit, her eyes had that same look. She barely knew me. She tried to pat my hand when I started crying, but it was like we were strangers.” She stopped and stared into the shadows. “After a year, some administrator called to say that Sunny had managed to hang herself with the sheet off her bed. He told my mother all kinds of bullshit to avoid a lawsuit, but I knew better. These people were so damned drugged that they were like zombies. That’s all the treatment they got. Sunny must have come to her senses long enough to realize that this was going to be the rest of her life.”

  I put my arm around Dawn’s shoulders. “You must have been enraged. Did you track down the doctors’ names on the Internet?”

  She nodded, but I felt her muscles tighten. “It took me ten minutes. Sunny hung there all night. They found her in the morning.”

  “So how did you find out that Randall Zumi was going to be a partner in the Stonebridge Foundation?”

  “I had to wait for almost ten years, and it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t about to get myself checked into that hospital. Finally, a friend of my mother’s went to Dr. Stonebridge for a face-lift and all that crap. He let something slip about his hush-hush project in Arkansas. A psychiatric facility. It was a long shot, but
I searched the Internet and found the stuff about the property sale. Zumi’s name was included. After that, it was easy to find the application for the license for a rehabilitation facility. I may not have been as smart as Sunny, but I’m not as stupid as everyone thinks.” She hiccuped. “Not as stupid as you think, either.”

  “Then you did what was necessary to get yourself in a position to be ripe for a few months of rehab. How did you convince your lawyer to choose this place?”

  Dawn took another swallow of scotch. “He’s such a little twit. He insisted that I go to this place in San Diego, but I walked out. I dropped a few hints about needing to get out of the state and suggested he call Stonebridge. Then I bitched like hell all the way here, just to make him feel as if the whole thing was his idea.”

  “Did Dr. Zumi recognize your name?” I asked. “You and Sunny were pretty famous back then.”

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m sixty-five! I don’t know if he figured out the connection, but if he did, what was he going to say? ‘By the way, your sister was one of my patients. So sorry I gave her all that Thorazine and she killed herself.’ Give me a break!”

  I edged to the end of the bench. “It didn’t take you long to find a way to get your revenge, did it? You were very clever.”

  “Of course I was. I searched his room, just to make sure he was the one, and finally found his résumé. On the second day after I got here, I started bitching about how sore I was from the exercises, so Zumi agreed I could have Demerol at night. I pretended to swallow them, but as soon as the maid looked away, I spit them out and hid them. Yesterday I ground up four tabs and waited until Zumi left his office. I put it in the gin bottle. I didn’t leave my fingerprints, did I?”

  “No, the bottle had been wiped clean of any prints but Zumi’s. That’s what made me suspicious. There should have been all sorts of prints on the bottle. Somebody sold it to Dibbins, and either he or his valet packed the bottles in his bag. Brenda Skiller put the bottles in a box, but saved a few of them for her depressed colleague. But there were no other prints.” I gave her a moment to mull that over, then said, “We won’t find any prints on the wine bottle in Dibbins’s room, either. You were very careful, Dawn. Almost too careful.”